World Revolution
by The Exile
Summary: The wandering Miracle Planet is about to reach its final destination, with apocalyptic consequences in the now simultaneously existing Good and Bad Future. Meanwhile, Classic and Modern Sonic are back in their time periods, trying their best to change Sega's doomed destiny. A sequel to 'Playing Columns on the Walls of Jericho' and 'Sealed Time', with cameos from other games.
1. Chapter 1

Twin wandering planets spiralled through the vastness of space in a never-ending journey. Their orbit around each other was tight but their gravitational fields never seemed to interfere with each other. A careful observer with a powerful telescope might have noticed that the way they almost clipped through each other had an aspect to it as though they didn't quite exist in the same Universe at all, but sidled in and out of their respective realms, somewhere beyond human comprehension. They could not have looked more different, and although both of them radiated majesty and beauty, it was a direct opposite sort of power and glamour. Only at the tightest point of their orbit did they almost seem to blur and merge into one. That was when they were most difficult to spot, as they were shrouded by the dark side of whatever they travelled to and from, giving the illusion that they completed each other and then cancelled each other out. It was a confusing appearance, but then, nothing was ordinary about those two planets.

One was a beautiful verdant planet of green rainforests and blue lakes, probably teeming with life, and it sparkled with a corona of rainbow lights, soft twinkling motes of cyan, magenta and lime green. An observer would probably correctly guess they were crystalline but would be completely clueless as to how so much rock debris of such varied colours emitting such bright light could have been trapped in the atmosphere of an otherwise Earth-like planet. Its twin planet was completely mechanised, a silvery smooth metallic orb, radiating a dull red light that felt harsh and menacing. Occasionally, something that looked uncomfortably like a weapons system large enough to destroy another planet loomed into view, but it seemed to be inactive. The twin planets did not threaten other inhabited planets. They did not approach other planets at all. Whatever their purpose was, it did not involve the rest of the Universe all that much. Like many twins, they simply wanted to be left alone. Occasionally, a flight of drones would emerge from the mechanised planet and mine out a local asteroid field or chase away an inquisitive explorer. At other times, strange waves of energy would pulse from the green planet, a process that caused its veil of gems to shine even more brightly. There would be a reaction with everything the light touched, both with objects in space and the fabric of space and time itself, but it was impossible for any current technology in the inhabited sections of the galaxy to determine what type of energy it was, never mind its purpose. A number of probes and exploration vessels, an unlicensed mining operation and in one case, a pre-emptive doomsday strike team, had all been sent to the planet by various species. None of them had returned, except for the ones whose wrecks had been dragged back by their own salvage drones.

Only one observer knew the truth of the twin planets. At least, he knew a few things that others didn't know and, as his ego was approximately the same size as one of the planets, he was under the illusion that he knew everything about them. One thing he knew for certain, was that the planets weren't threats as long as you didn't attack them first, although it was wise to keep a close eye on the mechanical one. They certainly weren't the enemy bombardment squadron that he had been tasked with predicting the appearance of, so he gave the order not to intercept them and to continue keeping all forces on standby. The fact that the enemy hadn't arrived was in itself noteworthy, almost as much as the reappearance of the Miracle Planet and its doomed counterpart. Not that he wanted to face an enemy he was not only outnumbered and outgunned by, but that he actually knew he was going to lose the overall war against. He had been banking on his foreknowledge of the future giving him an element of surprise in the coming battle. In short, he wanted to change the future he had witnessed during his bizarre journey through time. He just didn't want it to have already changed in a way that he couldn't predict.

It's a good job that the Miracle Planet has returned, thought Classic Sonic, I've already made a complete mess of the whole 'changing history' thing. Miracle Sonic will scold me for being an irresponsible time traveller again, for changing events in history without fully mapping out the chain of consequences, but at least he'll teach me how to do it right.

Classic Sonic didn't want to think about the worrying complication that the Miracle Planet wasn't supposed to pass by Mobius again for several centuries. He knew that something was going a little wrong on the planet - the most obvious clue was the existence of two iterations of the planet from two different timelines in the same time and place at once. Doppelgängers and parallel timelines were bad news - he at least remembered that lesson, probably because his teacher's urgent warning had been reinforced by a subsequent, rather painful personal experience of the danger. Doppelgängers from particularly nasty futures were even worse trouble. It wasn't *the* Bad Future, or at least it wasn't the one he had visited when he was fighting to free the Miracle Planet from Dr Robotnik's grasp - it wasn't chained to Mobius, for one thing - but it was close enough. He also knew that the version of himself that existed there at the moment could not be trusted. At the thought of that particular encounter, he winced and rubbed his legs to ward off the remembered pain.

"Are you okay there?" asked Alex Kidd, who was on his lunch break and sat on a three-legged stool in the corner eating a hamburger. The exiled Prince was the only person who believed Sonic. Everyone instantly accepted Sonic's story about time travel, it was the part about them losing the war in the future that had almost gotten him locked in a psychiatric ward. Alex Kidd had bribed the military to let Sonic out.

"Just an old wound," said Sonic.

"I thought you moved too fast to get injured."

"I walk into things sometimes," he replied, "It's nothing."

"You've been staring at that thing on the radar a long time now. You sure it isn't something we need to worry about? I could send out an Opa-Opa..."

Sonic shook his head frantically. The little biomechanical ships were skittish and enjoyed shooting at anything that scared them, "It's... it's an omen of bad luck back home, to see two wandering planets together like that."

"I didn't know you were the superstitious type!"

"I don't think it's really going to bring bad luck, but it's a big change. It's going to bring more big changes with it. I don't know if they're good or bad," Sonic was telling the truth, just not about the same subject as Alex Kidd thought they were talking about.

"I thought you knew the future."

Sonic looked at the display one more time. Just above the planets, there was a small constellation of five stars that he thought looked a bit like a bird. Tonight, there were six. The sixth hadn't been there before the planets arrived but it didn't look like it was a satellite of theirs. Somehow, this fact stayed in his head, more so than the existence of the planets and the change to the course of events in the war. This was significant. He didn't understand how he knew but he felt it deep in the instincts of a mind that had been subtly changed by too much time travel.

"So did I," he replied.


	2. Chapter 2

Neo Metallix had spent all day pulling down the statue of Robotnik in the town square of Stardust Speedway Zone. Now the blinking red lights bathed the stifling darkness inside the enclosed metallic dome with a wan crimson light that could have passed for a sunset if you imagined it was a normal, sane planet where you were allowed to wander outside and could actually survive without a biohazard suit or a cyborg body. Some of the lights were surveillance cameras, some of them were the sights of laser turrets or patrolling security drones, most of them were 'Low Power' warnings. It wasn't possible to see the sunset from outside either - the sky was still too full of smog to see the stars and even if the night sky was visible, there was too much light pollution from the constantly lit, constantly running installations all around the planet that weren't doing anything but didn't have any protocol for shutting them down. Fortunately, most of them had broken down on their own by now.

The ritual demolition of the statue would have gone a lot smoother had his wrecker robots not all decided to go on strike at that particular moment, as a protest against their long hours and lack of payment. He was fairly sure that Dr. Robotnik hadn't paid the robots anything or given them breaks, and he had never heard the evil madman complain about his robot army taking spontaneous industrial action. He attributed the new development to the effect of the other Sonic from the past, the one called 'Classic Sonic', who the robots had mistaken for their new Director and who had given them several rather poisonous commands before being forced to leave. Despite his best attempts, a few of the orders still hadn't been purged from their programming.

It was a shame that the time traveller had chosen to go against his plans. If they had worked together, they would have both achieved their goals in life. He forced himself to stop thinking about his annoying visitor by adjusting the levels of his neural implants with a quick smack to the side of his head. With his work enthusiasm cybernetically augmented, he now thought only of the satisfaction of a job well done.

The last symbol of Dr. Robotnik's reign was gone. He now owned the Miracle Planet, its robot factories and the death laser he had lied to Miracle Sonic when he said he had disarmed. In name and in spirit, he owned it all. He would not run it to the ground and then abandon it, as the Doctor had done. He would not chain it in place, mine it out and build a few cheap disposable factories on it, like he would an asteroid, not a world with limitless potential that allowed one to break the very laws of reality. But he would not simply let it go, let it do as it liked, as his counterpart did. Maybe he would have, if their places had been switched, but he could no longer even imagine being the same person. It wasn't just his way of thinking that had been changed forever. Maybe it was something about this world, how it was always in flux, or some way in which he had changed it again, even after the damage already done to it, but he was turning into something that was not Sonic. He could see more of it every day, when he looked at his reflection in the murky, stagnant, robotic piranha infested depths of Tidal Tempest Zone.

That's why he called himself Neo Metallix.

"Director! I wish to make a complaint!" warbled a voice behind him, interrupting his reverie. He flinched and tried to look like he had been supervising things and not staring pointlessly into the sky.

"What is it?"

"The level of distortion in the local space-time continuum is becoming a health and safety hazard! You promised to fix it years ago!"

"Well, go and fix it yourself. Is it Quartz Quadrant again?" the abandoned mines were relaxing to wander through, in a kind of forlorn way, but they were the least dimensionally stable part of the planet as well as the most likely to physically collapse in on itself at any moment.

"No, Director, it's heading right for u..."

Something threw Neo Metallix clear off the platform he was standing on, so that he landed on his back. He could see the glow even before he opened his eyes - the emerald glow that now suffused everything.

* * *

><p>Rapid and uncontrollable as a surging river, vivid as any lucid dream, the visions came all at once. It was all he could do to notice any details at all before he was swept away by a torrent of emotions and sensations, only a few of them recognisable, rather than the vague understanding that he was brushing against something far beyond his ability to comprehend, something that had already overwhelmed him. It wasn't malicious, although it terrified him by virtue of its sheer size and import in the grand scale of the Universe. He had always known that he was interacting with the unseen, unfathomable intelligence behind the very planet when he had these visions of his, it just hadn't been so unsubtle before now. This didn't feel like the usual visions: it was unintended, rather than a message sent to him by an intelligence that wanted him to see a possible future consequence of his actions. He was briefly worried that he was about to go insane, his mind finally snapping from the constant images of bad futures and the painful awareness of his ultimate failure to prevent them from existing. Even worse, he might have seen something he wasn't supposed to see and the planet itself would be angry at him. Finally, it occurred to him that the mind on the transmitting end might be in danger, even more so than usual, so much that it could only send this hasty, unfiltered psychic wave rather than the carefully planned set of images.<p>

The content itself was fairly normal, if chaotic. Mostly it was flowers, tall, thick stems with broad pointed leaves and petals in one of a whole rainbow of possible colours, their bloom so bright they almost shone with their own light. They had always grown anywhere on the planet they chose and spread fast, whether it be the bottom of the ocean on Tidal Tempest to the highest peak of Quartz Quadrant, even in-between the small gaps in the entirely metal flooring of Metallic Madness Zone. In his hundreds of years of existence on this planet, Miracle Sonic had worked out that the flowers were essential to both the planet's verdant ecosystem and its non-linear, flexible and entirely self-contained space-time continuum, and that once planted, they grew in all directions in time as well as space. Dr Robotnik had quickly worked this out and deliberately removed all the flowers in order to hasten the planet's decline and prepare it for conquest. Interestingly, he hadn't destroyed the flowers, but had used them as a control mechanism for his machines, something he normally only attempted with life forms of at least animal intelligence. Sonic had decided that the flowers must be some kind of organic computer network that allowed the intelligence guiding the visions to monitor and maintain the entire planet at once. And now they were everywhere, not just thriving but overrunning every square inch of the planet. Wacky Workbench Zone in particular had been taken over, until the floor was a carpet of vibrant rainbow bloom, trailing up the walls and around the purple stone and blue quartz-inlaid pillars with their softly glowing statues of various planets, stars and phases of the moon that gave the Zone the appearance of some kind of giant astrolabe, an oracular shrine to learning and true understanding of the Universe.

The plants were growing through the cracks in the secret door that Sonic knew led to the most recent location of the Time Stones. Panic gripped him as he thought for a moment that the plants were invading the sanctum in a bid to grab the Time Stones for themselves, that they really were trying to conquer the world as Robotnik had almost done. Then he realised that the plants were growing outwards from the inside, and that the Time Stones weren't being dislodged, they were still there and they were fully awake for the first time, like a dormant volcano gone live. Their bright auras flared outwards to wash over the entire planet, reflected in the petals of the flowers and the facets of the quartz that now filled up the former mining site, faster than any quartz had a right to regrow, until it looked like it had all those hundreds of years in the past, one endless, vast cavern of glittering, singing crystal. The statues in Wacky Workbench also crackled into life and bolts of electricity streamed out from one to the next. Up on the aerial walkways of Stardust Speedway, always a lively city despite Sonic never seeing the inhabitants (by now he assumed they had reached biotechnological singularity and uploaded their minds into the flowers and quartz crystals), the vast clouds of twinkling green and pink lights grew like fabulous digital locusts until they blotted out the sky. Then, as the lights that were now all around the Zone swirled in a bizarre dance like living fireworks, he realised they weren't just the lights of the city, they were the stars themselves, rising to join the sky, particularly the constellation with five stars. Except that it now had six stars and they flared emerald with a radiance greater than the sun...

Sonic yelled out as he woke up, the force of the vision causing him to fall over as he was walking, unfortunately fast enough that the sudden brake pitched him forwards several yards and landed him upside down in a flower bed. He yelled at the flowers to get off him, shoved them away and began running in the other direction, towards Wacky Workbench Zone. Please don't give me another vision that sends me off a platform in Stardust Speedway, he silently begged the intelligence. The response was a faint crackling in his mind that was the usual signal for 'visions are unavailable at this moment in time as we are down for maintenance'. That lack of signal, together with the abrupt response, was in itself unusual, although he was glad to see the world more or less in the same place as he left it.

Miracle Sonic was rather annoyed to discover that he had been denied access to the inner chamber. It wasn't the first time he had been locked out and he knew there was no way to force the door open. Even if he could, it would be an unbelievably bad idea. Despite his general helpfulness and competence, sometimes the godlike power behind the Stones just didn't feel like telling him what it was doing, or was worried the knowledge would crush his feeble mind. However, the timing of the refusal, straight after an urgent vision of Wacky Workbench itself, was in itself unusual. Abandoning courtesy, Miracle Sonic began yelling at the intelligence, demanding an explanation, and repeatedly banging on the door.

Upon the twelfth knock, as final as the stroke of midnight, a powerful sensation jolted through his hand that threw him backwards with a force that almost took him straight through a stone pillar. He shook his head free of both the pain and the raw data that had been forced into his mind, reminding him of the time he licked a Chaos Emerald as a drunken bet. He understood know: what he had seen was not something wrong with the planet. It wasn't from outside, either. It was natural, inevitable, and an Apocalypse, pure and simple. The entire planet was changing and it would not care if it accommodated sentient life in any form that Miracle Sonic would recognise. It would not care if he survived. He would not be able to go through that door again; it was closed forever. It no longer had need of his services.

He knew it was a ridiculously stupid idea but he couldn't think of anything else he could possibly do that might result in his survival, so he ran towards Quartz Quadrant, where his doppelganger had told him that he would always find him if he needed him, and yelled the insane hedgehog's name. The Hedgehog who claimed to have started out the same as himself, but who was so utterly mentally twisted that, even after being offered a way out, he continued to live in the Bad Future of his own free will.

If he could survive there, he mused, he might have the first clue how to survive here.


	3. Chapter 3

Sonic really wished he didn't have to fight the psychics again.

The first time he entered the Arena and met his competitors, the two small boys hadn't been the ones he worried about. He was learning the hard way that appearances could be deceiving. It should have occurred to him straight away how odd it was that a couple of children had entered a tournament to fight against an evil sorcerer, an intelligent adult male gorilla and a professional bounty hunter in a suit of power armour that could fire homing missiles, with perfectly relaxed confidence in their ability to win at least some of the battles. He had assumed they were insane, maybe desperate, possibly a combination of the two, like himself. He was a little uncomfortable at being put in the same match as them for the first band of competitions. While he was glad that his prayers had been answered and he would not be fighting against the female bounty hunter who kept giving him a murderous look, he didn't want his first act in his newly embarked quest to win back his people's freedom, dignity and respect by becoming an intergalactic arena champion, to be assaulting an underage child who had somehow sneaked his name into the entrant list. He was more likely to end up in an even worse prison than the one he was trying to free himself from.

Then he had learned – the hard way - about the spontaneous manifestation of psychic powers in certain children following contact with a hostile alien race. The knowledge had almost cost him the tournament, but fortunately the child in the red and blue baseball cap had gone after the blonde young man in the green uniform with the sword, who knew about the psychic powers and was already prepared. After they had been dealt with, it was down to just Sonic and the swordsman, and Sonic at least had enough prior experience of people trying to stab him with swords to know how to fight back.

Psychic children... if he had told Classic Sonic about this... if he had known at the time... if any of them had ever known... I don't suppose there's anything we could have actually done about it. Even if Classic Sonic had prior knowledge of the enemy's tactical decisions, an enemy who could read your mind would know immediately if you possessed such knowledge, would change their tactics accordingly... as they had probably done anyway, once Classic Sonic began pre-empting the enemy's moves. Nintendo still outnumbered them and they weren't complete idiots. And now he was up against their tactical mastermind, their other one, the boy with the blonde hair and the haunted eyes who Sonic hadn't realised was also psychic. Nobody else was in the ring with them this time, they were down to the quarter-finals, the boy had finally defeated the terrifying armoured bounty hunter while Sonic was still battling the disconcertingly weird two-dimensional shadow-creature who kept beeping shrilly at him while walking forwards in a slow, jerky motion as though time passed differently for him.

Don't jump in the air, remembered Sonic, don't put too much distance between yourself and a psychic. Their preferred power to use in battle was elemental blasts, mostly fire and lightning. Start running, close the distance, smack him before he has time to think. Watch out, he can still swing that baseball bat really hard, he's probably using some kind of telekinesis. Don't look directly into the eyes but if you see them start glowing yellow, run like hell. No, don't fall off that platform, you can jump it if means you don't fall. Watch out for that lightning bolt...

The boy's shriek stopped Sonic inches away from barrelling right into him, hopefully knocking him off the platform. He had fallen to his knees and was clutching his head, his fingers digging into the sides of his temples. He was screaming something almost unintelligible at the top of his voice. Sonic knew enough about psychics to understand that sometimes they went a bit crazy and lost control over their powers, that it left them vulnerable but they became unpredictable, often dangerous, sometimes tried to unleash all their power at once, and that you didn't want to be standing near them when it happened. He wasn't sure whether to take the boy down now while he was distracted or run for it. It occurred to him that this might be serious, beyond the realms of things that were expected to happen in the course of the competition, that the boy's life might be in danger or he might be about to accidentally kill someone for real.

"You okay there?" whispered Sonic. If the kid was in real danger, he had an opportunity to say so; he could clearly still speak. If he wasn't, he would interpret it as a taunt, he would lose his temper like any other kid, then they could get back to the real fight.

The boy's eyes snapped open. He lowered his arms almost robotically and stared straight at Sonic, his mouth opened in a vaguely startled expression as though he, too, had no idea what was happening to him. The eyes were bright yellow, both pupils and irises. Sonic turned to run. The boy put a hand calmly on his shoulder.

"I think it's coming for you," he whispered in an authoritative tone.

"What is?"

"I dunno," he admitted, "It's just there and it's asking after you and I don't like it and I want it to go away."

"Well, ask it what it wants with me and I'll tell it to shove off for you," said Sonic.

The boy leaned closer to the hedgehog and whispered into his ear. He was shaking as much as his voice was, "The stars don't twinkle, the moon doesn't shine. Birds don't sing, the wind doesn't blow... to the pure body, to the perfect existence..."

A chill ran down Modern Sonic's spine.

"Do you at least know where the song came from?" he asked.

"The stars," replied the boy, "I was trying to call them down for a Starstorm but they weren't there... well, they were there, but they weren't in the right place, and there were the wrong number of them, I don't think they were the same stars... and there were these three eyes looking at me..."

"Eyes?"

"There were only two in the sky but I could see a third, and it told me not to say about the third, but I think you were the one who needed to know, because it's... after... you..."

Before Sonic could say anything else, the boy collapsed in his arms. He yelled for the medic. He wasn't sure what would happen in the event that a competitor had to forfeit, he had a vague idea that there were robots of various power levels who could be used as stand-ins, and he wasn't sure he cared. There were about to be better things to worry about.


	4. Chapter 4

After half an hour of searching the Quadrant, Miracle Sonic had finally found the place of least resistance in the veil between one parallel timeline and the other, and it resulted in him almost falling straight down a mine shaft, then being surrounded by heavily armed drones. Their laser sights blinked on and off rhythmically in the pitch darkness as they circled him like sharks. He followed their movements with his eyes, challenging them to strike first, his whole body tensing to spring out of the way as soon as he sensed a shift in their pattern. This lasted for several minutes laced with all the tension of a protracted siege until a mechanical warbling voice cut through the dull, clanking echoes that resonated throughout the abandoned mines.

"Stand down, Security Team 5B!"

"But we have intercepted a dangerous trespasser!" replied the robot directly in front of Miracle Sonic.

"Supervisor Bot 25 has identified the trespasser as the Health and Safety Officer here for the inspection that the Union requested!"

The laser sight tilted in a rather sceptical gesture, "Anyone could claim to be an inspector. I don't see any identification on him! He's not even carrying a clipboard!"

"I... er..." Miracle Sonic's brain worked hard to think up a suitable response. He had never heard of Robotnik's robot army having more sophisticated thought processes than 'shoot all hedgehog-shaped objects on sight', never mind forming Unions and demanding inspections.

"I'm working undercover! I've heard complaints that the bosses around here will attempt to hide the health and safety hazards if they know someone's called an inspector! The things some people will do to cut costs these days, eh?" he tried to hide the nervousness in his voice but was painfully aware that it just made him sound even more like a maniac, "That's why I'm inspecting random areas of the mines, and I must say, the lighting conditions down here are terrible! Someone might trip and fall like I almost did! I think I dropped my clipboard down there as well."

"We're sorry, Inspector. Would you like my men to fetch it for you?" said the robot who seemed to be in charge.

"Oh, no need, I've got a good memory. I must say, I feel the need to complain to the Director about this, though!"

"But you'll blow your cover if you speak to the Director!"

"Yeah, you haven't seen the worst of it yet! Follow us, we know the fastest route around the entire mine, we'll show you the bit we're worried is about to collapse. We never get tea breaks any more either..."

As a mechanical claw grabbed him and hauled him up into the air, he mentally cursed himself for his stupid cover story. Now these idiots wouldn't let him see anybody at any meaningful level of authority, which presumably included the other Sonic, and he would be dragged around a mine that was apparently falling apart around him.

"Look, you can't continue working here, it's a death trap. You all need to evacuate right now!" It's the entire planet you need to evacuate, thought Sonic, and you're holding me up!

"You're going to close the place down?" the security robot swivelled around until his sights were quite distinctly pointed at their commanding officer, "You said that we were too vital to close down! Now we're all going to lose our jobs!"

"Now listen here, I wasn't the one who voted to..."

"Too slow!" yelled Miracle Sonic, darting past the robot whose back was now turned. The laser fire of the others missed him entirely and he was halfway down the far corridor that, mercifully, the lighting still just about worked in. Cries of 'get him!' and 'it's your fault!' echoed behind him but receded as he left them far behind. Despite the sprawling labyrinthine nature of the mine and the number of tunnels he remembered as exits that had since collapsed, it didn't take him long to find a way out. Gasping for breath – the place stank and he hated being in confined spaces – he ran in the direction he remembered as being the shortest route to Stardust Speedway.

It helped a lot that the stars in the sky were bright enough that he could now see them through the gloom. They were the wrong colour for this version of the world. Whatever was happening to his own world, it had already spread here. If this world's Sonic had anything left of the same personality as himself, he would be out there, at the heart of the trouble. Whether or not he was trying to fix it, he was almost certainly knee deep in it.

* * *

><p>"I'm surprised you haven't tried to lay the blame on me yet," said Neo Metallix, idly brushing the rest of the dust off himself. Dirt was lodged underneath the retractable razor implants in his third spine down. If it got clogged up, he might lose some of the movement in his back. He had fallen hard and been hit a glancing blow by the collapsing platform. If he hadn't curled up into a ball on time, he might have broken something. He could get it repaired but it would cost power. Still, it would have gone a lot worse for him if he moved a second later, if the platform had landed on him, if his augmentations hadn't included significant armour plating that still left him as mobile as before, due to rockets in the soles of his feet.<p>

"I won't lie and say the thought hadn't occurred to me," Miracle Sonic stared out at the stars that shone through the ruined ceiling, swinging his legs from the antennae on the roof of the security monitoring station, the highest they dared go for a quiet chat now that the platforms were unstable, "I need your help too much right now to enquire as to what you've been doing that makes you think I'll blame you for something like this."

"I take it things are as bad on your end as they are on mine, for once."

"What do you mean, 'for once'? Didn't I tell you that we both needed to watch out for space-time anomalies? Our worlds crossing over, both of our worlds existing in the same Universe at all, was always a sign that things were going to go wrong..."

"I thought you only just found out about this as well," he pointed out, "Through a mystical vision given to you by the Stones or some such nonsense. Since when did you turn into Knuckles?"

"Since when did you turn into Metallix?"

The other hedgehog frowned at the retort and stared at his hands, which now ended in mechanical claws. Then he shrugged, his face perfectly calm, "Anyway, I already asked the Information Terminal at Central Command about it. A massive space-time distortion is about to hit this planet. It's non-local, so it'll probably hit your world too. The place won't be inhabitable any more, even by us machines."

"I don't suppose you have a plan?"

"Of course I do. But I'm not sure it'll work for you. It wasn't intentional on my part but I have to think about myself and my people first," he said, "One thing we still have in our world that you don't, apart from those stupid holograms of me, is a network of transporters. They're designed to transport machines, so I have no idea what they would do if a biological organism tried to use them. I'm even taking a risk by using them myself, as I'm not yet a full cyborg. It is... mostly the reason why I've been fighting it a lot less these days," for a moment he was gazing at a point somewhere in the distance, then he shook his head vigorously, "No matter, it will allow the others to escape even if I can't."

"You care a lot about the robots here. I'm surprised."

"I never used to, but lately I feel kind of responsible for them. It isn't their fault they're stuck here and they've just been left running until they fall apart. I don't feel bad for having to destroy them when they were firing at me, or when my friends were trapped inside them, but now the situation has changed... I suppose I empathise with them a lot more, too, now that I'm almost a machine myself."

"They don't seem to think you're taking care of them, though."

"I'm not surprised they're wary of anyone in charge. Robotnik ran off and left this place to rot. I'm doing my best with the resources we have but I'm running out of fuel. The Zones need repairs. The robots all need repairs. Some of them still can't be reprogrammed to ever shut down and let me repair them. Robotnik didn't give them that option. Don't tell any of them but I'm always glad to see them show some backbone and take some initiative," he shook his head, "I hope they don't try and stop me evacuating them, though. I don't really want to abandon my home any more than they do. We worked so hard to try and get it up and running again. I'm going to find them a new home once I'm done here."

"Do you even know the transporters still work? That there's anything on the other end? It's been hundreds of years..."

"We have power to them, they're not in too bad condition and the test subjects I sent through came back in one piece. Don't look at me like that! They volunteered!"

"Sure they did," Miracle Sonic gave him a sceptical look.

"I'm going to have to be directly connected to the Central Command mainframe to operate all the transporters at once," he continued, "Every time I do that, there's a risk I'll completely transform. I had to do it recently to find out what was happening. It hasn't been long enough between transitions to be safe. I'm just warning you."

"Are you sure you have any idea what's actually happening?"

"Enough to know what I need to do," he shrugged again, "You can try and go through the transporters yourself or you can try and find your own way out."

"It sounds like an awful plan. You don't even know if you'll survive," said Miracle Sonic.

"And I suppose you have a better plan."

"We need to at least find out more about what's happening. Maybe we can stop it..."

"I tried find out more but the Information Centre was locked out of all its connections, its sensors jammed. The machine's sensors can reach almost everywhere on the planet. The only thing known to jam them is the Time Stones. Whatever is going on here, it's as if the planet itself really doesn't want me to find out. I'm not sure we can stop it if it's happening at that large a scale."

"The Time Stones kicked me out as well, and they actually want me to be there in the first place," said Miracle Sonic, "I don't get visions any more. Maybe if we combined our efforts..."

"If you plug into the computers, the same thing will happen to you that is happening to me. Not that it wouldn't be an improvement but I don't think you'd enjoy it. You might not be allowed back to your own world. It sounds like your world won't be there for much longer, so, as I said, it's your choice."

"You care about people a lot more than you let on," said Miracle Sonic, "Even in a place like this, you've found friends that you want to protect even at the expense of your own life. You co-operate with me even though we should really be enemies. I don't think we're all that different after all."

"Think what you like. I've got things to do," Neo Metallix jumped off the roof, stabilising himself and hovering slightly off the ground with his jets, then began yelling orders to his robots through a microphone headset that was built into his rightmost head-spine.


	5. Chapter 5

Miracle Sonic listened out for more visions but none came. Left without much of an idea what to do, he decided to help out with the evacuation of his planet's doomed counterpart (they were probably both doomed now, so he made a mental note to think of a better name to distinguish between the two). He had made a brief visual inspection of the transporters and most of them seemed fine – he only reported back two that had stopped working since last time they were checked. He still knew where they were from memory and he had to restrain his urge to break them all again out of habit. The robots began mobilising at the sites of the transporters. He had to leave before they mistook him for someone in charge who had a clue what they were doing and began asking awkward questions. Some of them didn't make it to the designated evacuation stations so he decided to keep himself busy by going out looking for them. Whatever was delaying them – falling down a mine shaft, having a tree fall on them in Palmtree Panic, reverting to their original programming and trying to kill all hedgehog-shaped objects on sight, failing to believe what they were told about the ensuing apocalypse and deciding to go on strike – Miracle Sonic made it his duty to pull them out of danger.

Meanwhile, Neo Metallix relaxed into his control chair, nestled in the core of Metallic Madness. A throne of steel and wires, he was attached to the computer systems all around him, virtually blocking out any sight of him from an outside observer, by interface points that connected at the back of his head, at the base of his spine, underneath each quill and into his hands. He threw the switch and was instantly thrown into a virtual world that overlapped and then expanded his awareness of the world around him. He saw a map of the entire planet that showed every installation created by Robotnik and now under his own control, giving him detailed information about their status and prompting him to manipulate its working at the deepest level. His eyes closed and a quiet serenity washed over his features that resembled Miracle Sonic in meditation. His body was still and he was indistinguishable from any other part of the facility – the fact that he was highest in the command structure didn't change this much. He was a slightly more crucial component in the machine. To harm the machine was to deny his own identity.

Warning lights in red flashing text popped up in clusters all around his overhead. URGENT REPAIRS NEEDED IN...

"Everywhere. I know," he sighed, "Begin activating the transporters from the perimeter inwards."

MASSIVE SPATIOTEMPORAL ANOMALY DUE IN...

"Far too short a time, yes, I know. Just do as I say."

EXPECT HIGH LEVELS OF INTERFERENCE.

"That's why I want you to do it right now instead of arguing with me and wasting time."

VERY WELL. DIRECTOR METALLIX AUTHORISATION ACKNOWLEDGED. SEQUENCE INITIATED...

Through the security cameras, he watched the forward scouts step into the crackling transporters, then disappear. Seconds later, they reappeared and gave the all clear. Then the crowd surged forwards towards the teleporters - the security robots were having difficulty corralling them into organised queues so that they wouldn't start trampling each other and wrecking the machinery in their haste to escape the unseen threat. On the other end of the scale, despite Miracle Sonic's best efforts, a small proportion of the robots refused to leave, unable to understand the concept of any life beyond the function they had been assigned by Robotnik, or any reason they would ever want to cease that function. They had at least been persuaded to head towards Metallic Madness Zone to guard their Director, ready to stand until the last moment to make sure he left safely. Again the teleporters crackled and again a wave of robots vanished, to be replaced by the next few hundred that the security robots allowed past the barrier at once. After an hour, the twisted, rusty mechanical jungle of Palmtree Panic Zone was entirely evacuated, then the contraption up on the hills of Collision Chaos Zone that resembled a broken pinball machine fell silent. The waters of Tidal Tempest were empty and the mining equipment in the hollow shell of Quartz Quadrant had finally stopped moving. The Central Mainframe had switched off many of its observation stations that had existed only to monitor the condition of the now empty zones, so the room in which Neo Metallix sat was suddenly a lot quieter. The cyborg hedgehog felt empty inside, his own energy drained as if a part of himself was now missing. I'm only moving sites, he told himself, I'll be able to set up on the other side. In the time it took for him to reassure himself, Wacky Workbench Zone had been evacuated and he would never again have to say the embarrassing and morbidly inappropriate name, reminiscent of a children's playground that came to life and murdered people every night, out loud in front of a robot army while keeping a straight face. Only Metallic Madness Zone remained. He would have to find a way to remotely activate the transporters so that he could enter them himself. He still lacked the security clearance – Metallix had never quite been trusted with access to a means of leaving the planet without Dr Robotnik's permission – so he would have to either hack his own systems and fake something or subsume himself so deeply into the system that he was mistaken for part of it, not just the person controlling it.

The last transporter in Metallic Madness Zone sent its last load of passengers out into the unknown. Miracle Sonic was still watching. The hedgehog didn't understand why his counterpart didn't just leave. There was nothing left for him here. Soon there would be literally nothing worth staying for at all. Didn't he have his own problems to...

Suddenly, his eyes glazed over and his vision went entirely red. He couldn't move and he had no sensory input from the outside world or the Central Mainframe except for a vague understanding that someone was usurping his command. No, he realised, they were controlling him. Maybe he was about to lose his free will now that he had finally become one with the machine. This felt different, though, too sudden and violent, less like a sudden realisation of something that had been happening over a long period of time. Someone was hacking him. From the other side of the transporter? No, the robots had already confirmed that wherever the transporters led to was completely abandoned, another Robotnik failed experiment. Something else wired into the system with even stronger and more insidious control than himself. Suddenly, he understood his mistake but the thought was already being overwritten by the stream of crimson destruction...

Miracle Sonic heard the loud rumbling and felt the ground begin to shudder. He began running towards the centre of the machine complex that already falling apart around him. He assumed that the planet was about to collapse now that nobody was there to run the machines that were the only thing holding together. He had to leave soon but he couldn't do so until he had seen that the other Hedgehog was still intact and was heading towards the exit. He hadn't seen Neo Metallix leave. The doors weren't opening in response to his approach as they normally did. It was the business with the Time Stones all over again. Come to think of it, the Stones wouldn't be in the same location in this world...

All the security terminals around the walls of the domed complex blinked on and off once, then stayed on, showing the same picture: the Control Room of the Central Mainframe, where Neo Metallix slumped in his chair like a broken puppet, motionless but not deactivated, his eyes entirely glowing red.

ALL REMAINING NON-ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL EVACUATE, blared a dolorous voice over the tannoy in time to a dull klaxon wail that was echoed in every single remote station on the planet, FINAL PROCEDURE ACTIVATING IN 5... 4...

"What final procedure?" yelled Miracle Sonic, "What the hell haven't you told me? Hey, I want a direct line NOW!"

He grabbed a handset and repeatedly punched in the key he had been given by Neo Metallix, with the promise that the security system should recognise his voice. There wasn't even a buzz to warn him that he hadn't been recognised: the intercom had been switched off. The tremors through the ground grew even louder and more powerful, knocking him off his feet so that he almost fell into an obligatory random spike pit before he regained his footing. The display screens, now upside down to him, changed to show a picture of Tidal Tempest Zone, which was sinking into the ground, the foul water draining away as something enormous, the source of the rumbling, slid into place so that it covered the entire region of the planet. A giant plane of quartz, he realised: the lens to the planetary-class death laser that Robotnik had built here, the one Neo Metallix swore he decommissioned as a gesture of peace between the two hedgehogs.

The lights in the mechanical hedgehog's eyes blinked once, then the laser began charging, the similarly coloured penumbra of light growing around it like a bud on some malicious flower that, when the petals unfurled, would unleash a stream of pure devastation on anything that happened to be too close to the planet's orbit in the same direction that the laser was pointing. He wasn't sure how far out the laser could go exactly, only that it was designed to eradicate a similarly sized planet. Another Miracle Planet... he had planned this from the beginning... he just wanted me off the planet so I couldn't even try to save my home...

The dread and remorse turned to utter confusion as he realised, after a few seconds had passed and the initial panic had died down a little, that the laser was pointing in the opposite direction to the planet's twin. It made no sense to fire at the other Miracle Planet anyway; this world was too close and would be destroyed by the impact of the debris. Then what was he firing at? They were floating through a rather barren and unremarkable, if quite pretty, nebula. There was nothing in the sky that could possibly be close enough to hit with a doomsday laser that would be worth expending the energy. Unless he just had a sudden unquenchable urge to fire it to see what happened. Unless he had taken a sudden violent exception to empty space...

The recoil of the impact sent Miracle Sonic flying. He had been plunged into a darkness more total than the bottom of the mines. Pain throughout his entire body barely registered, as though his mind were somewhere else at the time. A terrible noise pealed once, a loud ripping like someone tearing through finest silk with a jagged blade, but loud enough to be heard all over the planet. Then everything glowed emerald again. He was floating inside the dimension he usually only passed through to travel backwards or forwards in time, a nexus of pure energy where he should not be able to exist except when he had transcended matter through the sheer joy of motion. Except now he hung there, in the exact centre, as if the winds were holding him there rather than rushing him onwards. From somewhere very close, maybe all around him, and also much larger than him, taking up all the space that was not occupied by himself, he heard a voice. Or rather, a collection of voices, tiny, high-pitched, chirping, like birds flying in spirals through the sky.

"There is no need to worry any further. You are no longer in any danger. Everything is being taken care of for you, so that you may focus solely on your role as observer. You were brought here to watch the final stage in our plan, as you have watched every stage leading up to it, even those that happened before you ever existed. It would do you well to consider yourself the most privileged life form in the Universe. No other shall ever witness something like this, as it will not need to be repeated. For you are about to see completion itself, in its purest essence. Make sure you do not miss a moment."


	6. Chapter 6

Miracle Sonic watched the world from somewhere far above, as if in a dream. The laser had cut straight through the atmosphere and seemingly fired at empty space. At the point targeted by the crimson beam of raw destruction, the fabric of space and time seemed to shatter, leaving behind it a rift through which more of the same green void poured where the hedgehog was floating now. As soon as the pathway opened, the motes of light that now completely covered the surface of the other planet began rising up to meet it in a helix pattern, migrating into the higher plane. Six stars in particular pulsed as brilliantly as neutron stars, hanging in a fixed pattern around the slowly rotating column. The amount of energy being exchanged was too much to try and comprehend so he shut down his senses to avoid getting a headache.

"What is he doing with that laser?" demanded Miracle Sonic, mentally voicing the request with the appropriate amount of urgency. He recognised that the entity (entities?) speaking to him were using the same kind of communication directly into his mind as the source of the visions. They could even be one and the same.

"Only what he has been preordained to do since arriving on this planet," said the voices, "He is opening the way to that which has been cruelly forbidden to us. Only he has the ability to put enough strain on a precise enough point on the Universe to break a hole into a specific dimension."

"You mean, you wanted him to build that thing? But it was Robotnik's... he was going to use it to steal the Time Stones..."

"The invader was insane, he had no real need to come here, he only wished to steal our power and waste it. However, it was only when the invader arrived that we realised the possibility existed to force the Universe into a certain outcome. Only he had the will to come here at all, never mind to change something that was an absolutely inviolate part of the order of space and time. We observed him and took notes, then we realised he intended to do absolutely nothing useful with the things he was trying to steal."

"Why would you want something like that to exist?"

"At first we didn't, we only wanted to note down its existence so we could protect ourselves against it. But then the search went on for another few millennia and we found it. Or, we found the only point at which we could enter it, and saw that it was deliberately sealed off. Not just from us, from everyone in the entire Universe. It was never intended to be found. So, we had to break the rules, as we had discovered it was possible to do."

"What is 'it' that you need to find so badly?"

"The absolute optimal outcome for the entire Universe's fate," said the voices, suddenly sounding more exultant as more individual voices joined the psychic chorus, "The fulfilment of all destiny's objectives."

"A what, now?"

"You, of all people, should be able to see it the clearest. You have been living in the middle of our attempts to replicate it, part by part. You even saw the mechanism when you travelled between parallel worlds."

"I thought that was a mistake."

"We usually leave it locked, but we did not expect the dimension we programmed with the breaking codes to start breaking space and time in the wrong place and leaving holes everywhere. Up until now, it has been an unpredictable force that it took us many years to learn how to control."

"You're talking about the Bad Future? You let it still exist on purpose?"

"We now regret our earlier lapse in safety protocols, we should have strengthened the field separating all possible iterations of the Miracle Planet from each other as well as that separating the planet from the rest of the Universe before attempting to make use of such a dangerous and unstable dimension."

"How many Miracle Planets are there?"

"Now? Just the one designed to replicate the conditions of a certain point in space and time as much as possible, so as to force its existence, and one containing apparatus to break through the barrier that will appear around that point. While the planet was still wandering and obtaining information about all possible scenarios, still thinning them down until only the optimal scenario remained on the Miracle Planet, many billions could exist at once while we watched them play out and decided which one to keep."

"So, the Good Future wasn't anything to do with me after all?"

"Oh, it was. The invader could genuinely have destroyed our project by preventing our planet from moving. You stopped that from happening. We are eternally grateful to you. That is why we have been including you in the project, showing you our latest findings and how you can work with us to bring about the future you would desire the most, and also why we are allowing you to be the only individual, the only consciousness, to be an observer to this true and perfect outcome. Our own existence is... different. We are not capable of being direct observers. We will be content to exist within the Ideal Parallel."

"You never told me anything about this! You just left me trapped here and gave me weird visions!"

"Explaining to you directly what was happening would destroy our results, as the existence of an observer who is aware of what they are attempting to observe would change the nature of what was being observed."

"Then why not let me out? I didn't want to stay!"

"We never lied when we said we couldn't return you. The Miracle Planet's event field is a sealed infinite loop. To allow the rest of the Universe to be changed by our experiments would harm the Universe as much as it would contaminate all our samples. It is equally possible that either sequence of events would overwrite the other. Furthermore, when we do entirely break through into the forbidden sector of space and time, it could cause something catastrophic to happen. We would not wish this to cause a chain reaction that destroys the rest of the Universe."

"That's very considerate of you."

"You do not appear satisfied by something that, by definition, satisfies the achievement criteria for the entire Universe. Have we been lacking in our tutelage? Are you still having difficulty perceiving the Ideal correctly?"

"I can feel that it's there... I wouldn't have believed such a thing really existed if you didn't show me firsthand."

It was true. He hadn't realised it but he felt himself becoming gradually calmer, not the eerie, maddening calm of silence but the one that came of being able to move freely in all directions, as fast and as far as he pleased. The Universe had not stopped, it had completed. The only thing left was to become more at one with the Universe, with himself.

"I just... I don't think it's for me. It's beyond anything I can live in. Not forever."

"The Ideal is not an awareness of a continuous 'forever'. It is more a perception of a single moment."

"Sonic, the real Sonic, already lives for the moment. I can't live in something like this, though. I already haven't been me for a long time."

"Those changes were only as a result of the flux while the criteria were identified and fulfilled. By definition, the Ideal is the absolute culmination of the identity. To fully become oneself is an essential criteria for the final achievement of all life."

"Maybe that's so, but I think I should achieve it the normal way, in my own time, with everyone else."

"Are you aware that the Universe has been barred from reaching such an Ideal? That, here and now is probably your only chance of ever witnessing it?"

"This is your thing. You earned it. Not me. I was only along for the ride," he smiled, "I'm glad I got to hang around to see such an awesome thing about to happen but I can't follow you where you're going. The thing is... you didn't invite my friend. And he's still in a lot of danger. I have to rescue him. That's what I do."

It was difficult to realise he still had a job to do, here where conflict could not exist, without already being finished, where there could not be tasks that had not been finished to satisfaction.

"That is what this is about? You wish for other iterations of you to exist at the same time, even though the rest of the timeline is about to be collapsed into one. And on top of this, you want to be joined by your Doppelgänger from one of the worst possible outcomes of your destiny. Your needs are impossible and incomprehensible."

"I guess that probably means I'm not the kind of hedgehog that can exist in this place you're going to. I never did think I was quite perfect."

"Perfect is not the same as optimal. However, we hope for your sake that a version of you exists in the place we are going to," the voice sounded a little regretful but still chirpy, "Your timeline's iteration of the Miracle Planet is about to disappear, as it will no longer be needed. This is the optimal time for us to return you to the outside Universe. You will not be able to come here again."

"I understand. And I don't want to. I don't want to go back to my own world yet, though."

"The breaker planet is incredibly unstable now. You may not survive attempting to exist there for longer than a few seconds. We will try to keep up the shielding for long enough to give you time to rescue the other."

"Thank you," he said, "Good luck. I know who you really are, by the way."

"You do?" Genuine surprise gave their voices a certain lilt.

"I've met you before. Before any of this. That was a long time ago."


	7. Chapter 7

As he let go and fell, spinning back towards the plane of mundane existence, he saw the other shapes rise, also leaving behind this void that had only ever been a tunnel to the next dimension, a transient stopping point. The lights rotated faster, more adding to their number as they rose from the planet, until they formed a single broad horizontal ring of light, twinkling from the motes of light that were yet to attach themselves to it. The shapes flew through the ring in their spiral dance pattern, chirping their exuberance. They really were birds. Brightly coloured birds in every single hue, the same as the flowers had been. The flowers had probably only ever existed to spread the seeds of light on these currents of space and time, to this particular destination, he realised.

The final bird had disappeared through the ring by the time he reached the bottom of the tunnel. The patterns were fraying, the light turning an angry red. His every instinct screamed at him not to enter the roiling, fiery turbulence beneath him but he ignored his terror, threw forwards his arms and dove back into real space.

Neo Metallix had been busy trying to free himself with the assistance of a small cloud of robots who had stayed behind, maybe realising somewhere deep inside them, a silently running program created when they were connected too deeply into the world, that their leader would be in danger at this precise moment. Disconnecting him too suddenly would kill him, he was so closely neurally linked to the machinery, so they had to painstakingly disengage every level of connection in turn while not jolting the machinery while the entire planet was falling apart around them. Fortunately, they had a lot of experience of the planet falling apart and themselves having to still work in the middle of it. They had already freed his arms and given him some awareness of the world around him, so their Director was able to help them. However, this did cause them the additional problem of preventing a furious cyborg hedgehog from trying to tear the whole place apart on his own.

He acknowledged Miracle Sonic's presence with a glance and a dismissive shrug, "Did they send you to finish me off now I'm no longer needed?"

"I'm here to rescue you, moron," he said. One of the robots handed him something to hold carefully in place while they unhooked something from underneath it.

"You'll have to be quick about it, or you'll just get us both killed."

"If you want to see how your people are doing in their new home, you'll stay alive."

"You're right," he said. The cybernetic parts on his face did not include a mouth but Miracle Sonic saw a glimpse of humour in his eyes, and realised he was about to try something.

"This is not your machine! I am its Director!" he yelled out loud, contorting with the effort of his mental battle, his joints sparking, "I am overriding your authority. You will release myself and my remaining forces. You will cease trying to destroy this place."

A stream of error messages covered the display terminals, then suddenly they all turned off at once. When they restarted, they all showed a login screen. The wires retracted from the base of Neo Metallix's spine, the panels encasing him opened up, then his eyes went blank and he collapsed. Miracle Sonic grabbed him and began running.

He wasn't sure where there was left to run to, but he would try his best to find a way.

* * *

><p>"I haven't been here in years," commented Sonic as he stared up at the giant horizontal golden ring that floated above the circular trapdoor. It had been motionless, dull, its corresponding door barred for decades. When he left after freeing the inhabitants from yet another attempt by Robotnik to turn an entire civilisation into robot slaves, he assumed this was just another random place that he would never need to return again once he had finished his mission. Now it was humming with life again, golden sparks spewing from it as it lazily spun around like a malfunctioning halo left behind by an absentminded giant angel.<p>

"I don't like it here. I don't feel well," replied the small boy in a rather queasy voice.

"That's how my people feel every single day, on a world that isn't their own."

"Sorry," he whispered, bowing his head. The kid was useless at diplomacy but at least he was making a genuine effort and seemed to genuinely care about the suffering of others, even those who were technically supposed to be his enemies. Not having all that much experience, Sonic wasn't all that good with children, especially ones who looked like they were going to be sick – he really hoped Lucas wouldn't actually throw up all over the floor – but he still found it refreshing to be in the company of people who hadn't been given enough time to become jaded and corrupt yet. Maybe if the next generation learned to co-operate with each other, there at least wouldn't be another war. Not that it was any compensation for the entire worlds that had already been lost.

"No problem. I still owe you for getting me across the border without questions, and for helping me save my friends."

"We don't even know if we got it right. It was just a vision. It was kinda fuzzy. I'm not always right with them, anyway."

"It kind of feels right," said Sonic, "So, how do you think we do this?"

"If that ring is supposed to be where he comes out, we should be touching it. I'll try and concentrate. You have to be in contact with my mind. I can project your thoughts and you know enough about the person we're trying to save to find them, and convince them we're friends."

"Our minds are completely incompatible. You do realise this'll hurt a lot, right?"

"My mind always hurts a lot."

"Well, let's get this over with as quickly as possible, then."

Sparks came off the giant ring as it was gripped by two sets of hands, giving them both static shocks and causing Lucas' hair to stand on end. The second time they tried it, all that happened was a tingling sensation throughout their entire bodies and a roaring sound in their ears. Gradually, like a radio being tuned in, Sonic could hear coherent sounds through the white noise. The touch of Lucas' mind, although it was unnervingly alien, amplified his senses until he could understand the sounds. Voices like his own. Mechanical clanks, hums and whines, like something moving. Birds singing melodically and wheeling in the sky. The source of the voices noticed him and he felt the connection become two-way. Someone desperately reached out for him. He held out a hand to grab them, following the psychic boy's instructions on how to make it reflect true in the physical world.

The ring glowed a brilliant gold, sending out a shower of stardust...


	8. Chapter 8

News of their leader's return spread through the space station as quickly as it tended to do, when every single inhabitant was directly linked together in a digital network that could transmit almost any amount of information in a fraction of a seconds' time.

The station's powerful telescope and scanners had been programmed with the information necessary to match the exact signal that their leader transmitted, and had been running constantly since the facility had been discovered and they had recovered enough power to the base to reactivate it. The instant that a positive match was located, flying in a small vessel, fast, relatively unarmed but completely unknown in origin (not that they had much information on anything they scanned down yet), the space drones were sent out to to intercept the ship and guide it to their docking bay. Every single robot was ordered to drop what they were doing and appear in the main meeting hall, in order to assist in ensuring their leader returned home, to greet him, repair any injuries to him, record the story of his absence and then reconnect him as quickly as possible to their network in case he suffered any mental strain from being apart for so long. In short, they would give him a proper homecoming party. They knew from being told by random hedgehog-shaped intruders that a party involved large amounts of food and drink but they had nothing in the base that counted as sustenance except engine oil, which Dr. Robotnik used to drink but they were fairly sure their leader didn't. A scout drone had been sent out to where they thought the nearest inhabitable planet might be, to see if they had any drinks. By the time it found its way home empty-handed, Director Neo Metallix had already arrived. Fifteen years after their exodus to unknown lands, their leader had rejoined his people.

He had needed significant repairs. Some of his most serious damage had been repaired by the outsiders who discovered him and assisted him in his return. Their technology was impressive – while they had only recently developed as an interplanetary trading race, they had already built advanced humanoid robots of their own, one of which was holding a plasma launcher over one arm and staring at everyone in a way that made them paranoid. However, the repairs had introduced certain replacement parts that were incompatible with the network protocols, so had to be replaced and the repairs redone. After a very short time, his own self-repairing mechanism kicked in. He was soon fully networked. He refused the offer of a drink although some of his guests were thirsty.

Two of them were instantly recognised – hedgehog-shaped biological life forms, known to have intruded on the Miracle Planet previously. One of them had intruded quite often and was accepted as a useful presence, the other had only been sighted once and was of no concern. There was also a small, non-hedgehog, bipedal mammal and several much taller humanoid military androids who gave everything paranoid glances. He had been told that the small mammal was a human child who technically counted as an enemy, but there was currently a truce, and that the other hedgehogs had no idea who the androids were, other than that they claimed to be allies.

"Thank you for the help," said Modern Sonic to one of the androids.

"I'm glad we could work together on something, at least."

"Are you sure you won't reconsider my request?"

"We'll discuss it on the way back. In private. Away from the mind-reading child."

"I can't read minds," whispered the child, who seemed rather embarrassed at the admission.

"The other two deserve to be in on this."

"We don't know them. We trust you. We only agreed to speak to you."

"You do understand that they are me, right?"

There was a brief consultation about this, which, though it was in a language that none of them spoke, did not hide their obvious confusion due to their essentially humanoid body language. For all their seemingly advanced technology, they had no experience of time travel, parallel timeline hopping or any existential weirdness beyond the usual strain of the war on their personal identities. Good for them, thought Modern Sonic. He only wished he could quite trust them that the situation was as simple as they claimed it was – that they had always known who he was, that he had been working with them throughout the entire war and that it was the hedgehog who clearly had some kind of trauma-induced amnesia, or possibly even loss of personal continuity due to overuse of time travel. According to their version of recent history, they had survived the devastation and had been doing relief work, as well as sneaking people inside to free prisoners whenever they could. Sonic assumed that they were telling the truth that their entire race wasn't seven foot tall military androids, as they had demonstrated no cloaking technology that he knew of, so he didn't see how they could sneak inside anything without blowing it up to eliminate all witnesses.

"We understand that strange things have been going on, and that it isn't beyond the realms of possibility, so we have decided that we believe you, for the moment," the android informed Sonic. He barked an order to the others and they disappeared back up the steps to their spacecraft.

"Sorry about that. Politics... Are you going to be okay?" the hedgehog asked the Director, who reclined on an egg-shaped floating chair, rifling through the archives, bringing himself up to date with everything that had happened since the robots' departure, all the technical details he needed to know about the Death Egg in order to maintain the base there. The chair wasn't made to be ergonomic for a robotic hedgehog and his razor quills had accidentally sawed a large hole in the back.

"Why would I not be okay? I have survived a lot worse," he bared jagged metal teeth that he could literally grind together.

"You've been in the same place for thousands of years. You don't know anything about the outside world. And this is the Death Egg. It used to be Robotnik's main base. You don't know what he's left for you. He actually likes this place, so he might even come back."

"It is no longer an egg. We remembered that our Director hates eggs and all other Robotnik-related imagery, so we filed down the edges of the space station so it looked like a barrel, then renamed it the Death Barrel," a robot holding a clipboard told him, "In addition, we removed and melted down all objects with Robotnik's face engraved on them and exterminated all robotic chickens located in the facility. In the process, we disarmed approximately five hundred death traps!"

"Was there anything left over?"

"Indeed! As well as the egg chairs we decided were an important enough exception to the rule, we inventorised three thousand clipboards..."

"It was a joke, Supervisor 28B. I promise I'll program you to understand them next time I have a free moment," commented Neo Metallix, "Which the system just estimated to be in the next five hundred years. I promise you, next time you visit this place, it'll be because you're profoundly worried about how well we're doing."

"If you say so."

"If you want to help someone, please try and find somewhere for him to live," Neo Metallix pointed to Miracle Sonic, who sat on his own egg chair, staring at a screensaver. The faraway look in his eyes, which were still brilliant green, suggested he wasn't really looking at anything that existed in the mundane world. He didn't look as though he had eaten properly for a long time, "He won't have a decent quality of life here. This isn't a place where biological life forms thrive. I don't think he will survive if you just take him back to civilisation, either. For a start, nobody counts robot hedgehogs but there are a lot of people who would comment if there were more than one of you again."

Modern Sonic looked at the other survivor of Miracle Planet, "Where do you want to go? You should be the one to decide."

For a long time, Miracle Sonic didn't seem to notice he was being addressed, or even that he was being watched. Then he suddenly swung his leg across the chair and looked at Neo Metallix almost lazily over one shoulder.

"If it's all the same to you, I'd like to stay here for a while and borrow your facilities. Or, more accurately, your data banks. I still remember almost everything I learned on the Miracle Planet. I can't reach the state that the Flickies have ascended to but I can try and give a good future to as many worlds I can pass on the information to. I can put my teaching into practice by trying to keep myself alive on the Death Egg."

"No bioforming my beautiful mechanical utopia!" ordered Neo Metallix.

"I... quite apart from how can you be such a hypocritical..." Miracle Sonic spluttered and Modern Sonic had to hide his face behind a hand to keep them from seeing how hard he was laughing, "Have you ever considered the possibility that my planet thrived and yours didn't was because my technology wasn't horribly outdated and inefficient? That ours was so streamlined and transcendent it didn't even look like technology?"

"Oh, yes? Well, at least mine was loyal to me. Yours ate both our planets after mind controlling me and lasering a hole in space and time... on purpose! And I happen to have retained perfect recordings of every single thing that happened on my planet, from the day I arrived here! I even have Metallix's old memories!"

"In the memory banks inside your head? The one that was rusting and had nuts and cogs falling out of it when I found you?"

"I do not rust!" he snarled, "You know what... you take half the Death Egg, I'll take the other half, let's see who creates the best world if we start from scratch!"

"Well, I'll leave you to it! I think it's cheating if you have too much outside help!" Modern Sonic waved at them, now openly laughing as he returned to the shuttle. The main door opened to admit the remaining passenger. The boy had another migraine and his eyes were glowing yellow again. He was earning a lot of paranoid glares, especially as the ship's computer had suddenly been affected by interference and there were no signs of an ion storm. It would be a long haul back to the Colony.

* * *

><p>Not much startled Classic Sonic any more – not only had he seen the future, he had already lived through his worst nightmares, while being painfully aware that they too had been real events happening in the future that he would have to witness again -but the way that the dark-haired android in the black body suit and the titanium armour loomed over him was starting to make him nervous. The android who introduced himself as Wren was far too tall for his liking – Wren would have towered over a typical adult male human and Sonic was barely taller than a human child. The hedgehog hadn't met that many realistically human-looking robots. Ironically, he had met a lot more robots designed to look like hedgehogs. He hadn't got on well with those ones, and for that matter, he hadn't met that many robots in general that he got on well with, and the laser rifle mounted on Wren's arm was very big, probably too big for a human to lift. Sonic reassured himself that Wren was a known ally, a diplomatic representative of Algol, a solar system that was loyal to Sega. His summons had been received by Wren, rather than a less scary envoy, because Sonic had specified that he wanted assistance with an ongoing conflict, and Algol had assumed they needed to send someone durable. Algol was a troubled area of space and they had grown rather paranoid. Sonic had been charged to prove his identity beyond doubt before Wren agreed not to immediately turn his spacecraft around again.<p>

"We have not heard from you for years," said Wren, "You needed our help a long time ago. What made you finally turn to Algol for help?"

"Something happened to remind me of you," said Sonic, "A pair of lights in the sky. Twin planets. They reminded me of your binary star system."

"An unusual phenomenon in this area?"

"They're gone now," said Sonic, "They're wandering bodies. Except, I sort of feel like they won't be coming back."

"Algol has a wandering planet as well," Wren informed him, "It also tells us things. Although, ours always comes back. Sonic?"

"Hm?"

"Algol's cycle of fate is a delicate balance that must not be disturbed. I was told to pass that message on, from a friend who understands these matters a lot better than I do. We androids only mechanically keep Algol's population alive and safe."

"I'm not fond of all this weird stuff, either, to be honest. I just can't seem to escape from it. I'm sorry we abandoned you," said Sonic, "It wasn't my decision, but I should have been more involved in what was happening above my level of command, not just playing at being a hero. They said you wouldn't be needed, that you were outdated and they had found a replacement that would serve just as well. That's not a polite way to treat your allies, and it's not true. I believe the Miracle Planet pointed to you on purpose and I believe you're going to help me turn the tide of this war."

"Because of a Miracle Planet?"

"It'll be beneficial for Algol as well. They'll be forced to remember who you are, and how irreplaceable you are."

"There's no need to try and make promises you can't commit to for certain. 'Because of a Miracle Planet' sounds like a good enough reason to do anything – it's worked for us so far," noted Wren, "And it proves to us that you, in turn, have kept some of who you were. I'll see what I can contribute, although you must understand I can't leave Algol with understaffed defences."

Classic Sonic felt comfortable enough to shake Wren's enormous synthetic-skin hand, which was only a little cooler but a lot smoother than natural for a human being, as he left for his ship again. The android had been humming a tune that Sonic had almost forgotten, and he felt himself humming along as if he had been singing it all his life.


End file.
